


Circadian

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Lack of Respect for Personal Space, Light Smooching, M/M, POV Second Person, Watching of Sleeping People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 09:46:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6074608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t even need to watch with your eyes; you could just listen out for the hazy pulse of Cabeswater, wait for the sudden ebb for you and spike for him and know when it happens. But you like the way his nose looks crushed against the floor, and you like how his hands fall open when he sleeps, knuckles scabbing over in preparation for the new day. You watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circadian

**Author's Note:**

> I am making some serious progress on my game of ship bingo here. Over halfway!
> 
> [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) is a super champ and beta'd two fic in one day for me _and_ she gave me the prompt for this one in the first place. She is flawless.

There isn’t much for the dead to do while the living sleep. Fortunately for you, your friends are horribly crippled by insomnia and tend to be company at whatever hour you need. Not _good_ company, but still someone to sit with at four in the morning when silence has been too firmly established to break and just being awake together is an intimate action.

They do, on rare occasion, sleep. Gansey turns restlessly on his bare mattress when he manages it, and you don’t like to linger over him for long; something about how little he cares for his privacy makes you want to preserve it. But Ronan’s room is Forbidden, and so you shimmer through the closed door whenever you hear him snoring, you sit on his windowsill or you rummage through his broken things, stroke Chainsaw’s glossy feathers and you watch Ronan Lynch sleep.

You knew what he was already. You didn’t have to _see_ him pulling things out of his own head to know that he did it; Cabeswater is in his heart the same way it’s the air in your lungs, you and he both parasites to the same host – though you’re sure he’d rather not see it that way – and you knew the word _Greywaren_ before he even knew his name.

Seeing it is something different, though. The concept of jagged, brutal Ronan doing magic tricks made you laugh when you thought of it, but on the first night you watch, you realise your mistake. Sleep smooths the worst of his corners, it robs him of his danger, and you feel quite safe leaning over him as his breathing takes on the erratic patterns of a dreamer. What could he do if he caught you watching, anyway?

There’s a moment right before dawn, when his heart seems to stop, the entire world falling still with it as though Ronan’s held breath halts the wind with it. You find yourself curiously caught up in that frozen moment, staring down at him in the pre-dawn darkness, the shadows on his face softening him out into something almost human. And then he exhales, and the air is not the smell of a teenager’s poorly ventilated warehouse apartment, it’s moss and fresh earth and all the familiar nature that you’d buried your nose in when you died. It’s Cabeswater, and it’s him, and he sits bolt upright clutching a loom, warp threads waiting in dim shades of white and grey.

He looks to the corner where you are, and you cease to be in that same second, the apparition that you’re meant to be. If you know Ronan – and you know all of them a lot better than they think you do – then he probably won’t write you off as a trick of the light. But he won’t ask, either.

You walk around your small, empty room, feeling crowded by the massive, unknown apparatus you share the space with, and you attempt to breathe in air that smells still and dusty with the barest hint of old, greased metal.

Returning to Ronan’s room is inevitable, and you don’t even try to fight the urge. You sit up with Gansey until three, until Gansey’s words are a repetitive drone, Glendower facts slurred in with his assignment list for school. You gently, gently slide his glasses off his face as he lies back on his bed and falls asleep like the filament in his head burned out. And then you go to Ronan.

He’s been in his room for hours, though that’s no guarantee of sleep; he’s let you stay up with him enough times that you know he is a master of silent, melancholy tension; of drinking with his music blowing out his eardrums through headphones so Gansey won’t know; of picking his things apart piece by quiet piece, soundless, meaningless destruction. He is an incredible mess that you love to watch, and he lets you often enough. You feel like he wouldn’t like you watching this. That’s why you go.

You’re ready to flicker out of being if he’s awake, but instead you find he’s either moved to the floor or fallen out of bed and dragged all his bedding down with him. He looks miserably tangled up in his sheets, and you tug his pillow a delicate inch to the left to counter the crick building in his neck. Chainsaw watches you, eyes bright, but she seems to like you well enough, and you stroke her plumage while you wait.

It’s not long. The empty beer bottles on the windowsill tell you how he’s been spending his night, and you’ve already learned that drinking makes it easier on him. You don’t even need to watch with your eyes; you could just listen out for the hazy pulse of Cabeswater, wait for the sudden ebb for you and spike for him and know when it happens. But you like the way his nose looks crushed against the floor, and you like how his hands fall open when he sleeps, knuckles scabbing over in preparation for the new day. You watch.

You are rewarded by a sweet breath of forest air, a fresh inhalation of the summer you died, and then Ronan’s rolling over, a dark green bottle clunking down beside him. You can see smoke curling through the glass, and then he’s turning and you need to leave.

You go back to your room instead of disappearing, lie down on your bed and will your dead lungs to pull in mouthfuls of the stagnant air. There’s footsteps outside a minute later, and Ronan pulls the door to your room open, glaring down at you with no prelude.

You stare back. You want to ask what’s in the bottle, but you don’t, and Ronan shuts the door without saying anything. You can’t tell if he’s satisfied by finding you or not. You think you need to get a little better at hiding. Usually you don’t _need_ to hide, invisible enough even to those who can see you. But Ronan’s eyes are good at finding you, and you will need to get better at not being found.

The trick, you spend the next week learning, is knowing when to leave. That however much you want to stare at the impossible things your impossible friend produces, the moment when he first wakes is the moment when you need to stop being. He’ll show you what he made in the morning, anyway. He doesn’t return to your room after that, and you get to spend your afternoons marvelling over his creations. Gansey tries to figure out a pattern for the loom, Ronan uncorks his bottle of smoke and dares you to stick a finger in when it doesn’t coil out on its own, and Adam tries to make sense of the books he’s been bringing out, the ones where the words are never in the same place when you look back at them. Blue takes the potted plant that only blooms in absolute silence. You take the look on Ronan’s face when Gansey tells him he’s a miracle.

It feels easier every night. You learn his sleep patterns better than you recall your own, you learn what nights it’s safe to visit him at two and what nights you need to wait until four, and you can play the pattern of the shadows in his room behind your closed eyes.

It’s because it’s quiet when he sleeps, you think. Or it’s because it’s peaceful. Or it’s because you never get to see him without either a serrated smile or some variant on ‘anger’, because he likes you better than the others do, because he actually _remembers_ you when they forget, because once he tousled your hair and his hand was as warm as sunlight, because you wish you could see him so happy when he’s awake.

You go from leaning over him to sitting beside him to lying in his bed in too few days. You know you’re going to leave a cold spot behind, but you can’t help yourself, his bed is a wide swathe of expensive bedding in the worst condition luxury sheets have ever been in, and you curl up on whatever side he’s not on. For a while, you wondered if it was jealousy, the way you fixated on the gentle swell of his chest as he breathed, but you don’t think so. You have seen him dead already and that was one time more than you can bear.

Sometimes you want to touch him, and sometimes you want to stay, bask in the sweet scent of your burial ground and let Ronan tell you to stop, let him call you a creep and toss you out, door or window, whichever is closer. He might not. Every night you think you’re going to chance it, he stirs with a new wonder in hand and your nerves jitter until you’re safely gone. You’re a coward at heart, you know. You called it self-preservation, sometimes, back when you were alive, but it doesn’t work so well now that you can’t be preserved.

You kiss him, once. You press your icy lips to his, feel how rough and chapped they are, find a scar that must have been left by a bite, left by Kavinsky, and then you pull back. You didn’t know they’d gotten that far; another of his secrets for you to swallow down. You feel too full, between his and your own.

It occurs to you eventually that you can start making suggestions, and you do. You whisper ‘ _stereo system_ ’ over and over like a prayer to some Cabeswater god of Christmas, and when you feel the ley line’s pulse, you can’t stay to see if your wish has been granted. Ronan shows it off the next morning, the cordless, elegant little CD player that also picks up radio with perfect reception. You tell him, “You don’t need it, until you destroy the one you’ve got now,” and he snorts and lets you take it.

After that it’s more like a game. You alternate admiring him with whispering things for him to dream up, game systems and laptops and skateboards and music, everything you used to use to fill your short afternoons, everything you want now for the long hours when everyone else is away. You’re interested in so little that when you actually make a show of _wanting_ things, Ronan doesn’t hesitate to give them to you. You’re right; he doesn’t need them, doesn’t want them.

You don’t ask for things every night. You still like to see what he dreams up on his own, and you know Gansey is rather less enchanted with an eternal-battery laptop than he would be with a music box that played spoken words back in chilling chimes. But you like the little collection of things in your room. It’s not quite sharing a secret, but you’ve each got half of one and you could make something unknowable if you press them together. 

You have other secrets to tell him, but you don’t dare. The words thin to nothing whenever you think about getting them out, as empty and weightless and pointless as you. A coward at heart. A coward to your cold, buried bones.

Ronan has a bad day. He has a totally fucking awful day, a run in with Declan, some bullshit at school, the kind of ‘conversation’ with Gansey that gets carried out in increasingly terse, clipped tones. You just followed him into his room before he slammed the door, and you settle on the windowsill to watch the rampage, you and Chainsaw in the only corner clear from destruction. One of his walls has a spot stained dark red, and you watch him add to it, slam his fist against the plaster with clear intent to break at least _one_ of those two things. You’re glad to see the plaster crack in place of his knuckles, and then you watch him smash his bottle of smoke, white vapour hissing away to a sulphuric smell, watch him throw the rest of his beer bottles over your head out the window, tear the sheets off his bed to the floor where you know they’ll stay for weeks.

You don’t try to interrupt. You pull Chainsaw’s cage into your lap, ignoring the chirp of the bird inside, and you think about the Ronan that you have spent so many hours with, the one who gets to walk through forests and have endless summer ease the lines from his brow. “You should get some sleep,” you tell him, when he’s mostly burned himself out and is just standing, panting in the ruin he’s made.

He levels a glare at you, a hateful glower that isn’t even half what he’s capable of. “Fuck off, Czerny,” he says with careful enunciation, like he’s trying to express how crisp and precise his hatred for you is. You know them all so much better than they think you do.  

You fuck off. You wait a few hours, let Gansey murmur at you about meaningless English classes while he weaves a pretty white-grey pattern on the loom. And you go back.

He’s on the bare mattress, sheets still rumpled on the floor like you predicted. His bloodied knuckles have left bitter specks beneath them, more black than red in the hard light of a full moon. The night doesn’t feel so peaceful in the aftermath of his storm, and you step gingerly over shards of shattered glass like any damage to you matters. It doesn’t; not like damage to him does.

You don’t collect a pillow from the floor, just stretch out beside him and prop your head up on your elbow. Even in sleep, his scowl is sharp enough that you’d bleed if it caught you the wrong way. You feel miserable on his behalf, the deep sorrow he never allows himself, and reach out, brush your cool fingers over his cheek, smooth them over his brow like you can ease the frown out.

His eyes snap open, blindingly bright in the dark of the room. You freeze, surprise keeping you from just vanishing like you _should_ , and then he grabs your wrist, rearing over you to pin you down. Physically, there’s nothing keeping you in place. But it doesn’t feel that way, it feels like Ronan’s fingers are hard iron around you, strong enough to hold the supernatural down, like even if you tried to disappear he would lock you beneath him by sheer will alone. And you are too much of a coward to vanish when he so clearly wants you to stay.

“You need better hobbies, Noah,” he tells you, and there’s a warning growl to his voice but not outright anger. Not even a hint of surprise. You suppose he can’t really be betrayed if he knew.

“Sorry,” you say, more automatic than meaningful. You don’t think you are, really.

He makes an angry little noise in the back of his throat. You find that you are completely unafraid, and spend his silence looking up at him, watching the cold calculation in his eyes as he tries to decide what to do with you. The deep point of his scowl is gone. “You thought I didn’t notice?”

You shrug, with difficulty, your wrists still pinned by his hands. “Not after the first time.”

“My room doesn’t usually have cold spots,” he points out, and then adds acridly, “Cold spots _really close_ to where I sleep, no matter where that is. You’re a creep.”

You don’t think he means it. You blink up at him, thinking that if he’s not angry now, he’s not about to _get_ angry, and ask, “So if you knew, you didn’t mind?”

“Charity work; getting a dead kid a stereo,” he tells you. He doesn’t release your wrists, just leans down a little closer as you shift in your warm set of manacles, and you’re probably calmer than you should be, you’re probably the closest anyone has ever gotten to Ronan Lynch without bleeding. He says, “You could have asked.”

“No,” you tell him, “I couldn’t.”

“How lonely do your nights get?”

You consider, and say, “No worse than the days,” and he laughs, a harsh rasp of humour through his ragged lips. You know he’s had a wretched day and you know you might be making it worse, but you can hope. You can stare at him, as bleak and open as you are, and say, “I’m not sure I can stop.”

“Well, Noah, we can’t have you getting lonely.” He says it with the dry, familiar tone he saves for jokes that are just for you, and you smile obligingly up at him, whether he meant it or not. He leans further down, presses your foreheads together, and you can feel his exhaustion in every inch of him, feel the throb of his headache in his pulse and his long, weary exhalation over your cheeks.

He releases your wrists and they strain with the freedom. You bring gentle, cold fingers up to his temple, an attempt to soothe the low drum of pain, and he hisses at the touch, at the relief, at the fact you’re still there when he’s not holding you in place, at the fact he’s letting you be there.

You never thought your chill could be a romantic advantage, but it might be what he needs. Icy hands over his forehead, the back of his neck, stealing his heat from him like you stole the crease from his brow. He kisses you, once, warm lips moving against yours with more practice than you’ve had. You find the scar instinctively, tug on it as lightly as you can, let Ronan catch your lips with his teeth like he’s going to give you one to match but he bites just as gently as you did.

And then his exhaustion wins out and he collapses back, letting out a groan that comes from somewhere very deep inside him. “Noah. Fuck. I’m too tired for this.”

“Yeah,” you murmur, though you are not. His arms are spread wide and you take that as an invitation to tuck yourself up against his side. He doesn’t stop you.

“So this is just what you do?” he asks, voice already soft and hazy with sleep. “Watch?”

“Yeah,” you say again. You’d append ‘if you don’t mind’ except you would even if he minded. “I could stay when you wake up.”

He snorts in a way that you take as agreement. “Any requests for tonight, then?”

You think about asking him for a new miracle, one of his own making, whatever Cabeswater wants to give, and you think about asking him for a new television or set of headphones or anything you want. And you think about the slow, easy way he breathes when he’s dreaming, and you tell him, “I just want you to get some sleep.”

He snorts again, a lazy sound that he’s only half-present to make, and then you feel his breathing settle into long, slow pulls. You stay pressed up against his side, only leaving to pull up some sheets so that you don’t actually freeze him, and you wait for him to wake with the earthy scent of moss and bones and some new wonder in hand.

**Author's Note:**

> I still have a tumblr and am still eager for human interaction.


End file.
